Which is pretty much the definition of “whitewash”, since a whitewash is designed to produce no substance. With both Mann and Sandusky the story was “We looked into all the innuendo and found nothing, noth-ing. Move along.”

Penn State makes too much money off football revenue and now climate research grants for their administration to expose a scandal that could threaten that funding. So they not only look the other way, they hide the evidence behind a smokescreen.

Sandusky only harmed a hundred or so kids. Mann will harm all of them, making third world children stay mired in poverty and making Western children worse off than their parents or grandparents.

I agree. Sex predators seek to destroy only a few people, rather than billions of impoverished people worldwide, followed by civilization. Anyone comparing the two owes an apology to sex predators everywhere.

Such interviews should be public knowledge (at least for the Dr Mann investigation). All you have to do is find one such witness to disprove Sullivan’s claim. It’s worth noting at this point, Steve McIntyre’s take on this report:

The only interviews mentioned in the report (aside from Mann) are with Gerry North and Donald Kennedy, editor of Science. [Since they are required to provide a transcript or summary of all interviews, I presume that the Inquiry did not carry out any other interviews.] What does Donald Kennedy know about the matter? These two hardly constitute “looking at issues from all sides”. [A CA reader observed below that “North [at a Rice University event] admitted that he had not read any of the EAU e-mails and did not even know that software files were included in the release.”] They didn’t even talk to Wegman. Contrary to Spanier’s claim, they did not make the slightest effort to talk to any critic or even neutral observer.

Similarly, Spanier got fired (excuse me, “resigned voluntarily”) because he expressed unconditional support for two officials who had failed to report a child’s rape to the police. It wasn’t an investigation, but it was a public judgment made without considering witnesses against these officials or expressing concern for possible victims.

I’ll stick with the principle that he has to be proved guilty, rather than the traditional Weder position that people are assumed guilty and have to prove themselves innocent.

The argument’s been used that what might otherwise be private communications should be publicly available because they were made on the employers time, and that, because UVA and Mann don’t want them made public people assume “Skeptics” believe they must contain some climate alarmist secrets.

It’s far more likely that the reason UVA and Mann don’t want them made public is because they were intended as private (with lots of juicy opinions and gossip about this person and that person). Of course it can be argued that if communications are made on employers time Mann shouldn’t have any claim to privacy, but the reality is that virtually all employees have private conversations on the employers time, and that, understandably, none of us would want to risk the contents of those “private” conversations spread all over the global media.

I’d have hoped that most libertarians would jump to the defense of peoples rights to keep their own affairs private, and not be forced by the powers that be to submit to intrusions on their privacy, unfortunately most libertarians are “fair weather” libertarians, they abandon their principles as soon as they don’t suit their current agenda.

What Karl said. When I worked for a big company the policy was clear – you don’t own the messages sent on a company computer system and should have no expectation of privacy. As a publicly funded group, they should already know this, but they were caught being sloppy yet again.

I’d have hoped that most libertarians would jump to the defense of peoples rights to keep their own affairs private, and not be forced by the powers that be to submit to intrusions on their privacy, unfortunately most libertarians are “fair weather” libertarians, they abandon their principles as soon as they don’t suit their current agenda.

Dr Mann accepts public funding. That’s how he has compromised his rights in this area. His affairs are no longer private.

Many commentators quoted one email referring to “Mike’s Nature trick” which Jones used in a 1999 graph for the World Meteorological Organization, to deal with the well-discussed tree ring divergence problem “to hide the decline” that a particular proxy showed for modern temperatures after 1950, when measured temperatures were rising. These two phrases from the emails were also taken out of context by climate change sceptics…as though they referred to a decline in measured global temperatures, even though they were written when temperatures were at a record high.